An artist of manic diversity Franca Barraclough has dedicated a significant chunk of her career to making work as part of the small but culturally rich town of Alice Springs. As much as her imagination has been fed by the hot, complex, maverick filled wonderland, she has become a designer of the collective imagination of the place.

A distinctive aspect of Franca’s practice lies in her ability to drum up creative energy in the community that surrounds her through her idiosyncratic and hilarious perspective on the world. She then unselfconsciously uses that energy as her medium, drawing in participants to her collaborative projects and performances with a sense of purpose amongst the joy of art making. Her work retains a characteristic of unfettered oddness, as she is delighted by both local detail and international mythology alike and finds ways to draw the two together with unpredictable results.